Perpendiculous Perambulations.

Trampers are called trampers because they don't tramp. They crawl, clamber, slip, slither, slide and shiver, but they can no more tramp than a gopher can goose-step. They rope themselves together by their whiskers, keep their feet from freezing in alpensocks, leap chasms in short “strides,” and subsist on eidelweis and enthusiasm. They speak the Yodel, which is a sort of Swiss with a swizzle, and they get so close to Nature that they often have to be chipped off with an ice axe. To us poor flat-fish who live on the level and eat our meals without the necessity of jacking them up, such upended enthusiasm is inexplicable. Not for us the glory of the sun rising with difficulty like an egg nog vacating an ice box. Not for us the thrill of subsisting on a sub-section of sausage with the mercury registering two hundred fathoms below plimsol off a rock-bound coast, and the mountain crag shivering in its sockets. Never shall we tote “Matilda” up the perpendiculous pinnacles, or glissade down the glossary on an empty stomach. We are denied the joy of being fished up fissures and sorting out our feet in the morning after a night spent like an atom of frozen mutton in an Eskimo pie.